In competitive economies with private firm ownership, incomplete markets, and firm shareholders changing over time, several firm objectives have been proposed. Some are useful to understand efficiency of equilibria, and others are explicitly consistent with majority shareholder control or...

Corporate governance rules have an enormous impact on people's lives. This is true whether the corporation is public or private, and regardless of its size, since the rules governing corporate behavior and director conduct apply regardless of the size of the corporation or the number of its...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

We present a selection of seminar slides based on our 2013 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1640552" Managerial Miscalibration. Using a large panel of CFO forecasts of S&P 500 returns, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated,...

Analyzing data from approximately 1.5 million employees across 1,108 established public and private US companies, we find that employee beliefs about their firm's purpose is weaker in public companies. This difference is most pronounced within the salaried middle and hourly ranks, rather than...